Good Morning,
This week’s book is Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation by Stephen Johnson
In this book, Johnson explores the process of innovation and examines the environments which nurture creative and innovative thought. How can we set ourselves up for more eureka moments?
Introduction
Kleiber’s law describes the relationship between the size of an animal and its metabolism/lifespan. Larger animals have slower metabolisms and heart rates, and this might explain why they live longer. For example, a cat that is 100x bigger than a mouse will only have a 32x greater energy consumption.
Physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether this concept applies not only to animals, but also to cities. Are there any natural laws governing the growth of metropolitan areas? West and his team examined the spread of energy and transportation systems in cities. Interestingly, they found that Kleiber’s Law applies to things like the number of gas stations, roads and electrical cables in a growing city. The law proves that as life gets bigger, it slows down, and the same is true for the growth of cities.
However, the team uncovered one aspect of societal growth which didn’t follow this rule. They observed that for a city that was 10x larger than its neighbour, it was actually 17x more innovative. (The coming chapters will delve further into what it means to be more innovative). In the same way, a metropolis that was 50x larger than a town, was also 130x more innovative.
Something about the environment in cities makes the residents more creative and likely to have innovative ideas. But what is it?
Johnson identifies large cities and the web as “unusually fertile environments” for innovation. The following chapters highlight the 7 patterns of innovation which he observed during his research.
1. The Adjacent Possible
In many developing countries, infant mortality is still a significant problem. Modern incubators drastically reduce that problem, but they’re complex and expensive. In an American hospital, a standard incubator can cost more than $40,000. For this reason, many charitable relief organizations may donate incubators to countries in need. However, expense is just one part of the problem.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh was given 8 incubators from relief organizations. 4 years later, MIT professor Timothy Prestero visited the hospital and found all 8 incubators were out of order. The hospital staff was unable to perform maintenance based on the english manuals. A Boston doctor, Johnathan Rosen observed that many small towns in developing countries were unable to maintain various devices (ACs, laptops, televisions etc.) but were able to keep cars in working condition. This information led to the development of the NeoNuture. The device was an incubator made entirely with spare car parts. Headlights to provide warmth, dashboard fans for air circulation, and a motorcycle battery to power it. The genius of the idea was that it utilized the local supply of parts, and knowledge of car repair. These incubators could be built and repaired by the local people with ease.
Johnson argues that good ideas are like the NeoNurture. They are constrained by the parts and skills around them, not the other way around.
Great ideas aren’t $40,000 incubators that need to be donated and shipped. They’re the ideas you can cobble together with what you have available.
Scientist Stuart Kauffman has a name for this concept: “the adjacent possible”. It describes the limits and creative potential of innovation. All the combinations of ideas, tools and skills within our reach define our adjacent possible. Exploring this space leads to innovative ideas.
The Web is a technology that explored its adjacent possible faster than any technology in history. In 1994, it was a medium of only text and links. Only a few years later it was a place to shop, then a place to upload and watch videos. Today the web is the most effective content delivery system on the planet and is becoming the most popular place to buy things.
There’s a pattern which occurs throughout history, known as the multiple. It’s the phenomena of someone coming up with a new idea or device all on their own, only to find that multiple others also came up with it recently. A common example is the formulation of calculus by Newton and Leibniz at the same time.
An influential paper from the 1920’s titled “Are Inventions Inevitable?” explored this idea. The authors found 148 instances of inventors independently having the same innovative ideas, most of them within the same decade.
We tend to think of innovative ideas as eureka moments which come out of thin air to exceptionally smart people. However, the truth about great ideas is that they’re built on top of what already exists. Exploring the adjacent possible is how innovators find new ideas.
Take YouTube as an example. What if the website was created 10 years earlier? A majority of web users in 1995 had dial-up connections, meaning it could take up to an hour to download and then watch a 2 minute video. The developers would also have had to build their own video standard from scratch, as the technology they used (Flash) didn’t exist until 1996. Evidently, the web could not have jumped from text and links in 1994, to YouTube the year after. Instead, the adjacent possible had to be explored, until the video streaming website became a possible next step.
New ideas come from the knowledge and skills within our grasp right now. The trick is to learn what all those parts are, then explore them in order to develop new concepts.
2. Liquid Networks
There are many metaphors to refer to a great idea: breakthrough, spark, epiphany etc. However Johnson proposes one which looks at ideas at a very elemental level: a good idea is a network. Any idea you have is a specific network of neurons firing off in your brain. Neural cells exploring the adjacent possible of connections in your mind.
Johnson describes two conditions for a network to produce good ideas:
Densely Populated: You can’t have a good idea with just 3 neurons.
Plastic: The network should be able to adopt and explore new configurations. You can’t have novel ideas in an unchanging, static system.
This analogy begins to define a liquid network, one element of an innovative environment.
This graph shows a list of the most crucial innovations around the invention of agriculture and the earliest cities. There was a drastic rise of innovation right after cities began to form. One possible reason is that these cities created a network which had information spillover. The innovative ideas individual hunter-gatherers had would not spread to other people nearly as fast as they would in cities. In the dense network of a city, ideas have a tendency to get spread around, and innovated upon even further.
Johnson also discusses the work of psychologist Kevin Dunbar and his research on effective biology labs. This research was also discussed in the summary of Range which you can read here.
The typical office today is the opposite of a liquid network. Layouts are highly structured with walls, doors and cubicles. Often reflecting the company hierarchy. Some modern offices try to remedy this by tearing the walls down. Completely open workspaces without offices and cubicles. However the latter approach has been shown to be just as ineffective. It forces people to work entirely in the open, with no space to work in private.
Remember, a plastic network is one where the configurations can change, not one which has no structure whatsoever.
MIT’s Building 20 is a better model of a liquid workspace. The building was initially meant to be a temporary structure, but managed to last over 50 years. Today the building is known as the birthplace of some of the most creative thoughts at MIT. Noam Chomsky’s linguistics department, the Bose Corporation, and many others.
The key to Building 20 actually came from its temporary structure. Because the building wasn’t meant to be permanent, it was easy to rearrange the walls without much trouble. Groups could rearrange the space to match the nature of their work. Based on the same principles, Microsoft designer Martha Clark created a research building at the company’s Washington HQ, Building 99. The walls can easily be reconfigured on every floor of the building, most of them can be written on. The entire workspace is made to be readjusted for ideas to flow better.
To foster innovative ideas, create environments where ideas can flow freely.
3. The Slow Hunch
If we place ourselves inside liquid environments, and explore the adjacent possible, can we now have instant eureka moments?
Most recounts of innovative thoughts and ideas only capture the moment an idea comes into fruition. What we often miss — even when examining our own ideas — is the long history of thoughts and experiences that led up to it. Surface level narratives also leave out the impact of the environment which fostered the great ideas we learn about.
When examining many cases of innovative thought, one would find a long history of ideas, experiences and perhaps failures which led up to the final idea. Perhaps great ideas aren’t eureka moments, but slow hunches.
18th century scientist Joseph Priestly decided to isolate a mint spring in a sealed glass. Through this experiment, he made the crucial discovery that plants produce oxygen. His interest was not in the topic of plants or respiration at all. He was acting on a 20 year long hunch and curiosity. As a boy, Priestly had an obsession with trapping spiders in glass jars. He had a curiosity about the way that organisms could not survive in sealed environments, which led to his experiment 20 years later.
Google is famous for encouraging the pursuit of slow hunches through their “Innovation Time Off”. Engineers at the company are required to spend an hour of their time at work on personal projects. Google created an environment which allows their engineers to be creative. Former Google Vice President Marissa Mayer claimed that over 50% of the company’s products were derived from Innovation Time Off projects.
A crucial addition to an innovative environment is the freedom to explore hunches over time, rather than trying to force out good ideas.
Tomorrow’s issue will cover the next 4 patterns of innovation and some concluding remarks.
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Thanks for reading,
Sid